No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me • Hacker News Board

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#121

Post by hnhg » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:19 AM UTC

ageitgey wrote: post #87

zmgsabst wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely don’t understand why Google got it right with Circles, realizing we have different orthogonal interests… but all my YouTube subscriptions go in a giant pile, as if advanced math, news, and rap videos are fungible content. I want some ability to create sets of channels with a focus and only access that when I want to. I think the problem is that YouTube has always been a manipulative and exploitative platf…

On the mobile app, they show "pill buttons" for your detected interests across the top and you can click on them to filter those topics specifically. So they have put some nominal work into supporting orthogonal interests. The problem for me is that it just doesn't work very well. First, it's hidden deeply in the UI. Second, the topics are self-detected (poorly) and you have no way to edit them. Third, they seem to a…

Those also exist in the web app but suffer from the same issues you report.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#122

Post by bryanrasmussen » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:20 AM UTC

I obviously don't know what is going on at YouTube, but I would suspect - maybe they have stripped out a lot of personalization AI because of needs of keeping personal data separate / GDPR removable thus you now have one big pile of what everyone likes and maybe a couple things you like?

I noticed the things that I can see why they have there for me are distributed across the front page, not sorted first, thus I am scrolling through a bunch of crap they are trying to see if I like, and only a few things they know I like.

Frankly my youtube is polluted not just with what I like but what my wife likes and what my kids like, in fact there really isn't hardly anything I like only some Mark Twain stuff that is definitely being recommended because of something I searched for, which I actually don't even like but just researched for a particular product (Love Mark Twain, not fond of Mark Twain reenactors - and that includes Hal Holbrook [like him fine in other roles, was irritated by Twain])

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#123

Post by sandworm101 » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

bambax wrote: post #108

socket0 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me most about the recommendations I get are the videos I have clearly watched. "You recently watched this clip, so we at YouTube think you should watch it again."

This is like Amazon recommending the exact same item you just bought, sometimes from a different brand or vendor. "We see you bought a toaster, surely you need a hundred more."

Mabey they know that the first one you bought is scheduled to stop working soon.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#124

Post by supernova87a » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:21 AM UTC

Well, isn't this a product of the engagement-/advertisement-/"likes"-driven society online we've moved towards or incentivized thanks to technology?

It doesn't matter that something was downvoted as useless or just plain factually incorrect by a certain number of people. If enough other people found it worth upvoting as entertaining or feel-good enough for the couple minutes of their time, that's more important to the ranking. We just care about generating more views and traffic. Negative sentiment doesn't help traffic, only positive does. No bad vibes allowed. Pointing out factual incorrectness, dishonesty, or logical fallacies, etc. isn't important. No one got rich doing that.

On a more serious note... Any site that has eliminated the downvote count (presumably as it's not "informative" as to how much that content should be presented) and discarding legitimate information about whether that content is good or not, indicates to me that the site isn't worthy of a lot of respect as an arbiter of intellectually honest information.

Then again... if I'm relying on a dumb up/down vote count by the popular masses, how deep can that be as a measure of something's intellectual value?

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#125

Post by philliphaydon » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

alexb_ wrote: post #105

I've recently heard about this YouTube account named Roel Van De Paar. If you've looked up any error message on YouTube recently, you've probably run into him. Because of the "no dislikes" change, he's everywhere now. And by everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE. The account has over 2 million videos. Approximately 0.2% of ALL videos on the ENTIRE platform of YouTube can be attributed to this account, and if you check now th…

You've probably ruined my recommendations forever now. :(

I pretty much only stick to subscriber channels now except for stuff people send me. Since there's no dislikes I just don't browse the stuff available anymore.

YouTube is definitely worse off without the dislike counter.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#126

Post by narrator » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

krapp wrote: post #90

bowsamic wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, about 3 weeks ago the recommendations algorithm fell apart and ever since it has been a strange experience. Half of my recommendations are normal, but extreme low quality is being pushed quite aggressively

Spambot comments have exploded recently too, a lot of channel owners are complaining. Something definitely seems broken. I wonder if any of this affects GMail as well.

The Dead Internet Theory is becoming more and more true all the time.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#127

Post by _Algernon_ » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:22 AM UTC

yreg wrote: post #63

Finding good YouTube videos is a non-issue. There are more amazing sciency/educational channels than it is possible to watch.[1] Just subscribe to the ones you like and go directly to https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions [1] for example: 3Blue1Brown Beyond The Press CGP Grey Captain Disillusion Cody’s Lab Computerphile EEVblog EVNautilus Electroboom Engineering with Rosie Evan and Katelyn Everyday Astronaut Hal…

Combine this with unhook[1] and you can hide all the "algorithmic" parts of youtube aswell.

Only issue is channels that mix shorts (which I am not interested in) and regular content. If anyone knows how to hide shorts on a per channel basis in the subscription feed, I'm all ears.

[1]: https://unhook.app/

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#128

Post by celdon25 » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:23 AM UTC

benoketamad wrote: post #42

They pretend to be brain dead, that's all. Look, we are brain dead, go topple us. Btw. Imagine that your body turns off "feedback sensors" in your hand and you start to grab a glowing iron ingot and notice that your fingers and hand starts to turn into charcoal but you don't feel a thing. You do this repeatedly until you notice that your hand fell off and now can't lift the glass to drink water. How nice, how beautif…

I hope you realize that a shadowban will come soon if you keep making nonsense comments like this

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#129

Post by DoingIsLearning » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:23 AM UTC

throwaway2214 wrote: post #9

It saddens me what will be lost if youtube continues on this route, 99% of the content is garbage, and the 1% good content is hardly monetizable, and there is 0.001% that content creators monetize with some form of sponsorship, but not so much from google's pov You can see Dirac himself speak ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma7TSAq87lg ), Feynman ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3mhkYbznBk ), Jung( https://www.yo…

> and the 1% good content is hardly monetizable

My worry on top of monetizing is that the discoverability of good content is a lot worse.

I often already know content that is relevant and want to rewatch it but I now struggle a lot more to find it, drowned in all the non-sense surprised faces and clibait titles. I will often have to dig through history or notes or bookmarks to rediscover a specific video.

Re: No Dislikes has officially ruined YouTube for me

#130

Post by fs111 » Tue, May 10, 2022, 11:24 AM UTC

kilroy123 wrote: post #58

socket0 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What bothers me most about the recommendations I get are the videos I have clearly watched. "You recently watched this clip, so we at YouTube think you should watch it again."

Yes, so irritating. I don't understand why they do this.

"deep learning"